Are you doing cultural studies at home? Teach children to capture their knowledge and create a lasting memory of their studies with a simple lapbook.Disclosure: I am an Amazon associate and this post contains affiliate links. For full disclosure, please click here and thank you for supporting my blog!

Why a Lapbook?

My daughter and I spent more than a month in a virtual journey of China, and I really wanted to collect some of our projects together and have a memory of this month. Smarty cooperated, but she didn’t have any concept of lapbooks before we put this one together, and I cannot claim that she was very enthusiastic about it. Once we were done, she was certainly pleased with the end product and said that she wanted to share it in school. I am hoping that there are more lapbooks in our future if we do another in-depth country study like the one we did with China.

Making a Lapbook Cover

Since China is famous for its first fireworks, we chose to paint fireworks on the cover of our lapbook in traditional Chinese colors of red and gold. Smarty enjoyed using q-tips as her painting instrument.

What’s Inside?

The first flap of the lapbook is a short “world fact card” of China from Making Friends and a mini-book on Chinese inventions based on Look What Came from Chinabook that we read. Smarty chose to include rugs, porcelain vases, compass, dominoes, chopsticks and fireworks. The middle part of the book is a map of China and collection of photos (selected and printed from Internet) – Smarty chose Terracotta Warriors, The Great Wall, rice growing field, and The Forbidden City.

Porcelain vase was also on our China activities list. It was a lot of fun to do, but clearly daughter didn’t follow the rules of less is more or quit while you are ahead :) We added strips with our favorite China bucket list activities to the back of the lapbook, and now we have this fun memory of our summer virtual trip to China.

Your Turn

Do you do lapbooks with your children? How old were they when you started and how much they do independently (I had to do most of planning and prep for this one).

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I am glad you are here. I am a working parent who tried to bring purpose to my limited time with my daughter. My goal is to raise her a compassionate, independent, and enthusiastic thinker. Find out more about me and my blog in About Me section.

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